Practical Automation Guide and Tools for Busy Bloggers

Believe it or not, how hard you try to get time for blogging consistently, life often gets in your way. While maintaining your passion for blogging, there are several other things you need to consider, be it your 9-5 job to earn money, attending college, or running after your adorable, little munchkins across the house.

No matter how busy you are, try not to get your blog thrust into the background while you are coming up with your hectic schedule. Thanks to technology, here are some practical tools of automation that you—being a blogger— can use to extend your business and its exposure.

Why Use Automation?

As an average, around 49% of companies are presently leveraging on marketing automation. The adoption is constantly growing exponentially.

But why is everyone jumping on the bandwagon of marketing automation?

As stated by different research findings, marketers embracing automation avail a number of benefits, such as:

An average upsurge in revenues by 34% (Pardot, 2015)

74% of candidates claim the technology’s potential to save time as a key advantage. While 68% believed greater customer engagement has been the biggest advantage of automation; whereas, 58 percent reported to have more instant communications and better opportunities. (Adestra, 2015)

64% marketers claimed that the benefits of marketing automation were visible within the first 6 months of execution. (Regalix, 2015)

Along with enhanced customer experience, improved lead management, and effective email marketing—not to mention the reduction in human errors in campaigns— one of the most note-worthy benefits of marketing automation is its time-saving capabilities; A blogger can save sufficient amount of time to create fresh content and extend the business reach.

Content Curation

Having amazing content created for your blog is just half job done! You might be a proficient writer and adept in your industry, but producing quality content daily is a hard nut to crack especially if you’re a lone wolf. Still, you have to take a good care of your social media presence.

All you need to do to keep communication in action is to get a rich selection of well-written, valuable content that your audience will find helpful and engaging. Sharing posts, infographics, videos, and other sorts of content that can be— in any way— useful for your followers/customers will increase the value for your readers and amplify your credibility. Content is powerful and content curation (when done right) can be really helpful for the bloggers to build their reader-base and explore what interests them the most.

Some great content curation tools are Scoop.it, Feedly, Pocket, and Storify; they are effective in exploring, saving, and distributing quality content across the globe.

Scheduling social media posts

You need to keep your social pages active! Posting your updates on all social accounts can be a nuisance at times. Manage the time demanded on this task by scheduling content for social media pages and getting everything done in one fell swoop. HootSuite and Buffer are some widely used content scheduling tools that can streamline this tiresome task. Rather than copy-pasting same content on different accounts, twiddling different settings and uploading visuals indivisibly, again and again, it is smarter to plan all your social media content and scheduled it thorough a dedicated content scheduling tool. Some top SEO companies also offer social media marketing services using which you can capitalize on the experience of a proficient social media specialist.

Automation plugins for blogging

IFTTT is a feature-rich automation tool existing online. The plugin sends a daily email mentioning all the trending GIFs on Giphy; it also notifies if a new subscriber subscribes to your MailChimp list.

Email marketing has endless opportunities to increase the ROI. You just need to be sure that your workflow is well-established and –organized. You can exhibit an appealing subscription form using a WordPress form builder. You can also start an automated workflow and trigger a welcome campaign after a new follower adds to your mailing list. CaptainForm is a handy WordPress form builder that quickly drives new leads to the blog and automatically adds them to the mailing list. It can be integrated with GetResponse and MailChimp.

Getting help from a virtual assistant

A majority of bloggers has admitted that having a VA around at the outset is a smart move for your business. Many people are tentative about paying someone before even starting to make money, but doing this can give you enough amount of time to concentrate on your essential, revenue-generating tasks.

So how to get a skilled VA that can tone down all the chaos? Freelancer platforms are just the right way to go! On platforms like Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr and PeoplePerHour, you can easily get access sot a talent pool, both in your region and across the globe.

When you hire a VA, you have to be sure about what sort of tasks you’ll need to outsource so that you can search for the right skills. Are you looking for someone with great English writing skills? Does the VA need to own technical knowledge or relevant experience? Does the time zone matter?

Conclusion

Once you have started off with your blog on the right foot and you are generating revenue from it, it’s time to let it grow. This will save you from spending your days managing a to-do list that has little or no impact on your earnings. Automating tiresome tasks that do not demand manual effort as an essential can free up much of your time and help you scale your business without no added investments.

Author Bio:

Mawiya Karam is a passionate writer and travel enthusiasts. She has been working as a marketing head in a web design company in Dubai. With an experience of working for different niche markets, she has gained a solid insight into business marketing. You can follow him on twitter and G+ for updates.

Did You Enjoy This Article? Subscribe to our RSS Feed!

If you enjoyed this content, you can get automatic updates by subscribing to our RSS Feed. For those of you familiar with RSS you can follow Riches Corner via our RSS feed. Simply enter your email below and you’ll get one daily email notification of the posts published on Riches Corner that day.

Did You Enjoy This Article? Subscribe to our RSS Feed!

If you enjoyed this content, you can get automatic updates by subscribing to our RSS Feed. For those of you familiar with RSS you can follow Riches Corner via our RSS feed. Simply enter your email below and you’ll get one daily email notification of the posts published on Riches Corner that day.